To-Do List: Dharun Ravi’s Sentencing; Foer Returns

To know: Dharun Ravi will be sentenced today; he was previously convicted on charges stemming from Tyler Clementi’s suicide. (Read Ian Parker’s reporting on Clementi’s death) … The European Commission offered Google the opportunity to settle the antitrust investigation against it … A suicide bomber in Yemen killed more than ninety people, and injured at least two hundred … Three people died on Mount Everest this weekend; two more are missing … Franklin Foer is back as the editor of The New Republic, replacing Richard Just, who’d replaced him.

For a growing number of strategists and operatives in both parties, the very nature of what it means to work in politics has shifted. Once wedded to the careers and aims of individual candidates, they are now driven by the agendas of the big donors who finance outside spending….

“I think at the end of the day it has to do with money,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant who works with Let Freedom Ring, a group set to spend $20 million on political advertising this year. “If you’re a top consultant today, you’d much rather have a presidential super PAC than a presidential campaign.”

In the insular but fast-growing world of super PACs and other independent outfits, there are no cranky candidates, no scheduling conflicts, no bitter strategy debates with rival advisers. There are only wealthy donors and the consultants vying to oblige them.

The transformation drew new attention last week with the revelation that Fred Davis, a prominent Republican advertising strategist, had sought financing from a conservative billionaire for a $10 million campaign linking President Obama with the fiery, race-infused sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Obama’s former pastor….

Mr. Davis’s plan quickly collapsed, but not before highlighting how a single donor matched with an aggressive consultant could have an almost instant impact on an election — and with far greater ease than from inside a rival campaign, with its bureaucracy, constant travel and potentially cautious candidate.

Michael Wolff writes for New York on his mother’s health and the downside that comes with our newfound longevity:

I didn’t need to be schooled in the realities of long-term care: The costs for my mother, who is 86 and who, for the past eighteen months, has not been able to walk, talk, or to address her most minimal needs and, to boot, is absent a short-term memory, come in at about $17,000 a month. And while her LTC insurance hardly covers all of that, I’m certainly grateful she had the foresight to carry such a policy. (Although John Hancock, the carrier, has never paid on time, and all payments involve hours of being on hold with its invariably unhelpful help-line operators—and please fax them, don’t e-mail.) My three children deserve as much….

We make certain assumptions about the necessity of care. It’s an individual and, depending on where you stand in the great health-care debate, a national responsibility. It is what’s demanded of us, this extraordinary effort. For my mother, my siblings and I do what we are supposed to do. My children, I don’t doubt, will do the same.

And yet, I will tell you, what I feel most intensely when I sit by my mother’s bed is a crushing sense of guilt for keeping her alive. Who can accept such suffering—who can so conscientiously facilitate it?

“Why do we want to cure cancer? Why do we want everybody to stop smoking? For this?” wailed a friend of mine with two long-ailing and yet tenacious in-laws.

To watch: For those of us who missed it, a slide show of yesterday’s eclipse.

Alex Koppelman was a politics editor for newyorker.com from from 2011 to 2013.